The Vitality of Toads enclosed in Stone and Wood. 275 
in the cell No. 9, where the glass cover remained entire, and where 
it appears certain, from the increased weight of the enclosed animal, 
that insects must have found admission, we have an example of these 
minute aninials finding their way into a cell, to which great care had 
been taken to prevent any possibility of access. 
’ Admitting, then, that toads are occasionally found in eavities of 
wood and stone, with which there is no communication sufficiently 
large to allow the ingress and egress of the animal enclosed in them, 
we may, I think, find a solution of such phenomena in the habits of 
these reptiles, and of the insects which form their food. The first 
effort of the young toad, as soon as it has left its tadpole state and 
emerged from the water, is to seek shelter in holes and crevices of 
rocks and trees. An individual, which, when young, may have thus 
_ €ntered a cavity by some very narrow aperture, would find abundance 
of food by catching insects, which like itself seek shelter within such 
Cavities, and may soon have increased so much in bulk as to render 
it impossible to go out again, ‘through the narrow aperture at which 
it entered. A small hole of this kind is very likely to be overlooked 
by common workmen, who are the only people whose ara on 
stone and wood disclose cavities in the interior of such substance 
Tn the case of toads, snakes, and lizards, that occasionally issue from 
stones that are broken in a quarry, or in sinking wells, and some- 
times even from strata of coal at the bottom of a coal mine, the evi- 
dence is never perfect to shew that the reptiles were entirely enclos- 
ed in a solid rock; no examination is ever made until the reptile is 
first discovered by the breaking of the mass in which it was contain- 
ed, and then it is too late to ascertain without carefully replacing 
every fragment (and in no case that I have seen reported has this 
-everbeen done) whether or not there was any hole or crevice by 
which the animal may have entered the cavity from which it was ex- 
tracted. Without previous examination it is almost impossible to 
prove that there was no such communication. Inthe case of rocks 
mear the surface of the earth, and in stone quarries, reptiles find 
ready admission to holes and fissures. We have a notorious example 
of this kind in the lizard found in a chalk pit, and brought alive to the 
late Dr. Clarke. In the case also of wells and coal pits, a reptile 
that had fallen down the well or shaft, and survived its fall, would 
seek its natural retreat in the first hole or crevice it could find, and 
_ the miner dislodging it from this cavity to which his previous attention 
had not been called, might in ignorance conclude that the animal was 
coeval with the stone from which he had extracted it. 
